The book 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP AMERICA by Bernard Goldberg is a simple and cute idea. The American Film Institute has their 100 Greatest Films lists, there’s the easy reading 100 Naked Girls which could lead to 100 Promises to My Baby.

By pointing a finger at living people the author disapproves of, this catchy title smells a bit like the intolerance of the Hollywood Blacklist, made amidst anti-Communist hysteria in America in the 1950’s. Stay tuned for many magazine and hastily published copy cat and follow-up 100 Lists, each with their own spin.

Everyone has an opinion about this concept, and it makes for interesting brain scanning while one is idlely waiting for hours at an airport or painting a house. An equally interesting, and perhaps more helpful book would be 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE HELPING IMPROVE AMERICA, but perhaps that would be too Reader’s Digesty or just too difficult for Bernard Goldberg to research. It’s easier to criticize than to create, and we live in rootin’ tootin’ times when folks find it more convenient to shoot first and ask questions later. Or as the “screwed up” Michael Moore says on his web site, it’s easier to investigate steroid use in baseball, than to investigate CIA leaks.

Here is a link to the complete list at progressive U. I am happy to see on the list the bizarre radio mouth, Michael Savage, as well as the hooker lovin’ preacher Jimmy Swaggart. And yet the list is benign, as if Goldberg omitted the best and brightest investigative journalists, truth tellers, muckrakers such as Seymour Hersh, in favor of folks who are better known and in many cases retired, thus being ineffective at screwing up America. So, beware of the horrible Anna Nicole Smith and Harry “Dayo!” Belaphonte! And that do gooder Jimmy Carter, he may just pump up another dangerous charity such as Habitat for Humanity and cause property values to plummet!

While avoiding these screw ups in the Entertainment world, you can work on a list of 100 Screw Ups in the U.S. Goverment, such as Abu Ghraib prison commander, General Janis Karpinski and her band of photo happy prison pranksters, Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, Specialist Charles A. Graner, Private Lynndie England, and four others. Following a chain of command of government officials and the contractors they hired, it would be very easy to make a list of 100. Not a book that many proud Americans would care to buy and display on their living room coffee tables.

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